DropUpLoad is a very light, simple and robust utility which manages your uploads in the way of a spooler. It can run from an USB device.

It manages the connection's errors and concludes its missions even with pretty bad conditions.

No installation is necessary: just copy the exe file and double-click, it's ready! It can run when copied on an USB device.
You can create as many servers as you wish. They will appear in a combo box at the top of the window of DropUpLoad.

Then select a server, and drop your file in the central rectangle. The file will be added to the spool list and the upload will start as soon as possible, accordingly to your connection and server availabilities.

Each file can have a different destination if you change server between each drop. DropUpLoad is undoubtedly the simplest way to update your site.

It is neither a demonstration nor a limited version.
It is a FREE software.

Read article from 3d2f:...Of course, you could use some huge monstrous "FTP
client software suite". OK, you COULD, but DO you NEED? Especially, if
you eventually want to upload just one file or several small pages a
month, what should you do? The answer is DropUpLoad... >> Read more

DropUpLoad is awarded by many distributors:

FTP protocol and non-ASCII characters
(Chinese, Arab, etc…)

Since its version 1.80d, DropUpLoad manages the file transfers while fully dealing with Chinese, Arab, or any other non-ASCII characters. It has been successfully tested with Serv-U, zFTPServer, FileZilla Server and many UNIX servers.

Here is some information intended for users having troubles with this type of file names and FTP transfers.

1 - ASCII codes, UTF8 and Unicode

The Western characters are generally coded in ASCII.
ASCII is a table of 127 values proposing a correspondence between a number and each letter. Letter “A”, for example, matchs with the number 65 in capital letter and 97 into tiny. This table of 127 values is also wide enough to contain accentued characters used for French, Spanish and many other languages. This way of managing the accentuated characters however started to show its limits when data processing was begining international and when the number of accents to be represented exceeded the capacities of the ASCII table.

This problem became completely insoluble when the data processing specialists wanted to manage the Chinese alphabet (more than 2000 characters) and a lot of other alphabets (Arab, Greek, etc) which are competely different from the Western model.

The ISO 10646 standard - more often called “Unicode” - was so intended to define a general principle of management of international characters. It comprises many under-standards types of encoding as UTF1 - UTF7 - UTF 7,5 - UTF8 - UTF11 - UTF16 - EUC - UCS4 etc.

Since Windows 98, Microsoft manages characters using the Unicode standard and uses the UTF16 encoding system for the main of its softwares.

As you can see through this example, an ASCII character corresponds sometimes to two characters (in truth 2 bytes) when it is coded in UTF8. The standard ASCII characters (without accents) are coded in only one byte and some other characters can be coded in 3 bytes. In this standard, the number of bytes corresponding to a character is variable.

UTF16 standard which Windows uses, has a fixed number of 2 bytes to represent each character.

2 - FTP, UTF8 and Unicode

The original FTP protocol supposed that ASCII would be the only possible way to encode characters. In the strict applyance of this standard, the use of accentuated characters is prohibited. This limit could not however be maintained, regarding the needs of countries using a too vast alphabet to be encoded in ASCII.

Can one reasonably ask a Chinese guy to represent his file names in Western alphabet in order to record them on a distant server?

Vis-a-vis this problem, a consensus decided the use of UTF8 standard. This standard indeed has the fantastic advantage of matching perfectly with the ASCII table for all the non-accentuated characters. Thanks to this match, an old ASCII FTP server remains perfectly compatible with a FTP Client using UTF8 and vice versa. This compatibility will, of course, be limited by the use of non-accentuated ASCII finenames.

If you wish to transfer a file named with accentuated or Chinese characters, it is absolutely necessary that the client AND the server are both UTF8 compatible.

The business becomes a bit more complicated when you look at the way of recording these files. Let us suppose that we deal with a FTP client runing under Windows. The original filename is coded by Windows in UTF-16. The FTP client will have to convert this name into UTF-8 before sending it to the server. And what will the server do with this name? How will it record it? Well, that depends on the server! In their current versions, Serv-U (v6.3) and zFTPServer (v2006-06-13) record their filenames using UTF-8 whereas FileZilla Server (v0.9.18 beta) convert in again into UTF-16 before recording it.

But all that doesn't matter, after all: the server can do whatever he wants if it is able to restore the name in the good way when you ask it to download the file.

The difference is however perceptible in a particular case: let us suppose that you did install a server on your PC. Your parameters must specify which folder the server will use to store the uploaded files. Now, upload a chinese named file and open directly the server's folder using Windows:
- If your server is FileZilla Server, you will see the chinese filename under its normal appearance because FileZilla Server and Windows use the same way of encoding it.
- If your server is Serv-U or zFTPServer, you will see an incomprehensible file name coded in UTF-8.

3 - Inter-compatibility of the servers

Each server can record the file names as it wishes and we saw that it doesn't really matter as long as it communicates with the client using UTF-8.

A very awkward problem can however occur if you uninstall a server in order to replace it with another one. All the files recorded by the first can become unreadable when you trie to read again them through the second.

The solution is to:
-
A) make a copy of all these files through a FTP client and by using the old server,
- B) erase completely the server volume
-
C) install the new server and recopy all the files using a FTP client

4 - The option “opts utf8 on”

Some FTP servers are compatible with the
“opts utf8 on” command
and will answer by
“200 UTF enabled mode”
when they receive this command.

When Uploading, the server will now receive the UTF8 Filenames and then manage them as ASCII filenames.

When Downloading, the server will convert ASCII filenames into UTF8 before sending them to the client.

This option is usefull when you want to upload an accentuated filename using an UTF8 compatible FTP Client and make it readable by a non UTF8 FTP Client or vice-versa.

It is not usefull for managing chinese filenames.

5 - Compatibility of FTP clients with UTF8 standard

Few FTP clients works correctly when they have to transfer a chinese filename:
- With FileZilla Server, Internet Explorer upload the file correctly, but does not always post its name correctly when the contents of the FTP is visualized
- With Serv-U and zFTPServer, Internet Explorer generates an error at the time of the upload and does not correctly post the file names when the contents of the FTP is visualized
- FileZilla Client (v 2.2.18) upload the file but allots a name which is only a continuation of ??? and which will not be exploitable any more thereafter. This client is not either able to visualize correctly the file names using non-ASCII codes
- DropUpLoad works whatever the server is.